Excerpt: Pastel Perfect

“Calvin… Please tell me you know what you’re doing…” a nervous looking girl shifted back and forth on her feet as her twin fiddled with a lock outside the window. The window of another teenager’s bedroom, in one of the perfect pastel houses of their orderly neighborhood. The window that he was successfully breaking into.

“Not really. This is for fun, remember?” She could hear his grin as the lock gave a quiet ‘pop.’ “We be in, my darling sister,” he whispered, carefully sliding the window up, gaping and open and leading into a place she knew they should not be going.

“That’s lovely, hun, lovely. You don’t know, and I don’t know- so who does know? Hm?” she challenged in a quiet grumble as she watched him slip his small form inside without making a sound. He held out his hand for her, and of course she grasped it tightly and followed him. They could never not follow each other.

“God, maybe, if he’s alive,” Calvin winked, kissing his sister’s lips when they were safely in the room, holding her playfully close. Everything was so quiet, they could hear the other girl’s sleeping breath. The moon even outlined the bed by the far wall, perfectly picturesque.

“That’s a depressing thought,” she sighed as she pulled away from him and reached into a small black pouch hanging from her belt loop. She brushed angled black bangs from her eyes so she could see a little better to find the red marker. They were there for just a simple prank, simple but meaningful. A warning. This girl, this teenager sleeping peacefully, constantly looked down on the twins. She was a ringleader of sorts at a school filled with plastic people that the twins didn’t want to fit into even if they could.

She tossed the marker to her brother and found a black one for herself. Humming just under her breath, she leaned over the bed and artfully drew the marker over porcelain skin. She heard her brother humming a separate tune and looked up to see him writing his warning, the words twisting prettily around a wall of laughing photos. She grinned.